Much of Cindy’s control was honed from her exposure to the sea, a journey that began when she was not yet in the fourth grade and the prospect of going out on her parents’ sloop for an afternoon filled her with dread. “She hated the tipping of the boat,” recalls her mother Sally, a former chemistry teacher at the old Rosemary Hall school when it was based in Greenwich. Sally raised Cindy and her two younger sisters, Beth and Ander, in north Greenwich with her husband Mike, a program engineer at IBM now retired. “Her sisters would tease her because she clung so to the side. But she got over it. We told her we were going out sailing, and we weren’t going to hire a babysitter. By the time she was ten or eleven, she couldn’t wait to go out. Now I don’t think you could put enough sail on a boat to please her.” The Thebauds were, and Cindy’s parents remain, members of the American Yacht Club in Rye, a place Cindy credits for her development as a sailor. By the time she came to Taft, Cindy was an eager member of the school’s highly touted sailing team. “The Navy ran a couple of high school regattas I’d go down and race in,” Cindy recalls. “Once a year, they’d host a regatta at Annapolis. There’d be people
there who had sailed the Great Lakes, people from California, from the Gulf Coast. One of the reasons the Navy does this is for recruiting.” It worked on Cindy. When it came time for college, Cindy had Annapolis down on her short list along with Brown. She collected the necessary letters of recommendation from Senator Abe Ribicoff and Congressman Stewart McKinney. Sally knew which school she wanted her daughter at: the one without the uniform requirement and a mandatory five-year postgrad service commitment. “It’s like joining a nunnery,” she remembers thinking of Annapolis, “only when you become a nun, you can get out before five years.” But Cindy heard a different drum. Both Brown and Annapolis had sterling academic credentials, but at Brown, undergraduates wrote their own majors and designed their own curriculums. For someone who always sought a degree of structure in her life, Annapolis was more attractive. “It was 1980, too, the year the Ivies just went over ten grand a year,” Cindy says. “It seems like a pittance now, but back then it was a big deal. So either you paid a huge tuition at Brown or you got paid an active-duty midshipman’s stipend at the Naval Academy!”
䉳 There is life beyond the ocean blue. Cindy, at far left, joined the women’s glee club at the Naval Academy. When she can get away, she loves to drive in a convertible—with the top down.
䉱 Sisters Beth, Ander, and Cindy enjoy a happy moment during a Christmas reunion.
䉱 Cindy crawls out of a foxhole during a summer training session between her second and third year at the Naval Academy.
䉲 Young Cindy was not particularly fond of being on the water, but since her parents were sailors, she had to accept it. Now as a Naval commander, she will live months at a time on the sea.